S5 E04 - Glyphosate Roundup - MAHA Myths versus Science

Roundup, RFK Jr., and the MAHA Moms: How Bad Science Spreads

After a dinner conversation with a woman repeating seminar claims about Roundup, the host explains that “Roundup” is now a brand name and some products contain glyphosate while others don’t, so labels matter. He argues many heated debates about glyphosate are driven more by politics, activism, and symbolism than by evidence, noting court verdicts aren’t the same as scientific conclusions. He describes glyphosate’s plant-specific mechanism (blocking the shikimate pathway) and contrasts IARC’s 2015 “probably carcinogenic” hazard category with regulators’ real-world risk assessments, citing EPA, EFSA, and Health Canada conclusions that typical exposures are unlikely carcinogenic. He compares glyphosate’s public-villain cycle to past scares like saccharin and Alar, discusses agricultural trade-offs versus more acutely toxic herbicides like paraquat, and urges questioning without rejecting science.

00:00 Maha Moms And Roundup
00:34 Dinner Table Debate
02:21 Roundup Brand Confusion
03:53 Science Beyond Politics
06:14 Protective Instincts
07:57 How Glyphosate Works
12:09 Linked To Cancer Claim
13:08 IARC Hazard Vs Risk
16:34 Past Chemical Panics
18:30 What Regulators Conclude
20:13 Farm Risk And Tradeoffs
22:44 Risk Anxiety And Meaning
24:19 Be The 10th Man

#Roundup #MAHAmoms #antivaxxers #glyphosate 

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Transcript

The Tenth Man 0:11

Robert Kennedy Jr. Wants to Maha, make America healthy again, and the Maha Moms want Trump to ban Roundup. Bad science can be found on either side of the aisle today on the 10th man. I was seated at dinner the other night near a woman who had just come from a seminar. Oh boy, had you. Now she'd been to the mountaintop and the speaker had been an entomologist who thinks that you are killing all of the bugs, and she was excited about what she had learned. The speaker had warned about lawn chemicals, especially Roundup. At first, she was talking mostly to the other people, especially the men, uh, in her party at the table. But every few minutes she turned to me, kept making eye contact, and you shouldn't mow all of your property, was one of the things she said. Now I'm acquainted with this woman, but, but she's never been to my house. She has no idea what I mow and. We have just over an acre and we mow about a third of it, but that didn't slow her down. It never does with this type. She explained that Roundup runoff was damaging the ecosystems addressing this, I think, to, uh, her father-in-law and. I mentioned softly that I think she's confusing Roundup with fertilizer where runoff really is a problem, and I mentioned that glyphosate when used properly, actually binds tightly to the soil and doesn't run off easily. And I learned this decades ago as a teenager when my Aunt Ruth was talking about this new product that came out and said, yeah, when it hits the ground, it's neutralized. And it's not quite neutralized, but pretty much. But that didn't slow her down. She insisted it's in the water supply. And then she delivered the real bombshell. Did you know she said they've actually stopped putting glyphosate in Roundup because it's so dangerous. And I said, well, I doubted that very much. And it's true. The speaker said, so. She says, well, Roundup. Now has become a brand name. It's not a single chemical compound anymore. It's, it's been commercialized, so you can buy it at the home center. Most people had never heard of Roundup, let alone glyphosate, the active ingredient within the last, uh, before maybe 20 years ago. But I remember when it came out 40 or 50 years ago, and now some products labeled Roundup do contain glyphosate and others don't. And. Glyphosate is out of patent production, so others sell it. So you can find non Roundup products that have the same active ingredient in it. And the only way to know is to read the label, which you should be doing. You should be knowing, you should be knowing what chemicals you're putting on your, on your plants, on your yard, on your fields, or whatever. So at this point when I said that her companion pulled out her phone and Googled it and a moment later announced triumphantly, not everything labeled Roundup contains glyphosate, which is exactly what I had just said. So people don't really listen and, and I don't know how much this bothers me, it did, but it did remind me of something. I mean, we've all been here before and. A lot of the loudest arguments about Roundup glyphosate or other chemicals have very little to do with science. And, uh, lest you think this is gonna be a partisan lecture, let me say, uh, science doesn't belong to one political party. It shows up anytime people start with a conclusion and then look for evidence to support it. Sometimes the left, sometimes the right, but very often it's. Someone looking for a cause. And progressives often reject science when it conflicts with environmental narratives. But conservatives have their blind spots too. And you can see this in parts of the the old anti-vaccine movement. And this is some of the same people. And now more recently, you can see it in parts of the Make America Healthy again, Maha movement. And supporters of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Sometimes called the Maha Moms. They have been organizing campaigns against pesticides, herbicides like glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup. And many of them believe or say that they believe that these chemicals are driving chronic disease, but belief is not the same thing as evidence. Now, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Himself, became widely known for helping bring lawsuits against Monsanto over Roundup. Now it's owned by Bayer or Bayer of Germany, and those lawsuits produced enormous headlines and multi-billion dollar jury verdicts. But surprise, the courtrooms are not scientific institutions. Courts and the juries in the courts decide liability at best. Usually, however, it's just they decide. Who they feel sorry for and who else can afford to pay them. But scientists have to evaluate evidence, and those are two very different processes. So if we're gonna criticize progressives for ignoring evidence, we have to apply the same standard. Because science isn't conservative or liberal, and the evidence doesn't care who voted for which party. And of course there are a few nut bars on both sides. Now here's another pattern worth noticing. Many of these modern health crusades begin with people who feel responsible for protecting families, and historically, that role has often fallen to women. It's women who do homeschooling, for example, because they don't think the schools are adequate. Mothers monitor what their children eat. Mothers are often the first to raise alarms about potential health risks. They'll follow their instincts. My own wife took our child off a long-term prescription and it turned out she was right. He could do without it, and that instinct can do enormous good. Some of the most important public health reforms in history began with exactly that kind of proactive protective energy. But when that instinct meets incomplete information, it can also produce crusades that target the wrong problem. And that benefits no one in these crusades chemicals, whatever that word means, become villains, products become symbols, and once a movement forms around a symbol, then question. It can feel almost like questioning the cause itself. Now that dynamic isn't limited to women. But if you look closely at many modern food and environmental movements, the organizing energy often comes from the same place, and it's a feminine, genuine desire to protect families. It's good intentions, but mixed with bad information. Now, glyphosate is a herbicide. Again, most people never heard of Roundup, let alone glyphosate until it became controversial. Well, glyphosate's job is simple. It kills plants, but how this chemical works is truly amazing. Once you understand it, it's the equivalent of intrauterine heart surgery. It works by blocking something that's called The Shikimate Pathway. Now Shikimate is a four step pathway of organic chemical processes and plants use that pathway to produce certain amino acids, the building blocks of protein. Now you block that pathway and the plant can't make the protein. It needs to survive. So soon after application of Roundup or glyphosate, that plant begins to die. Now to the eye. It often looks like the plant has been chemically burned. The leaves turn yellow than brown. The plant collapses. And that visual effect leads people to an understandable, well, perhaps juvenile thought. If it does that to a plant, imagine what it would do to a person. Well, the answer is nothing. It would do nothing to a person. You know, back in junior high we heard, and I don't know, it was from a science teacher or from another kid, that somebody put a rusty nail into a bottle of Coke, and the Coke took all the rust off the nail and people said, imagine what the Coke does inside your body. Well, inside your body, what it does is. Nothing. What took the rust off was carbonic acid. And Coca-Cola goes to your stomach and your stomach produces hydrochloric acid, which is much stronger than a carbon acid. Well, any acid can be stronger. What matters is the level, but being your stomach is used to acid and it doesn't mind it. And if Coke was bad for you, it would burn going down. Well, it kind of does, but you take my meaning. So saying, imagine what this does, what this chemical on this organism does, and translating it to another one. Uh, that's not how biology works. Because you're an animal and you don't have a Shikimate pathway. Humans don't have it. Dogs don't have it. Fish don't have it. That whole biological, biochemical system exists in plants. And in bacteria and fungi, but not in animal biology. Glyphosate targets a biological process that animals simply do not use. Now, you can think of it this way. Insulin is essential for humans. Without insulin, a human being will die because you can't process sugar, but insulin means nothing to a tomato plant. Plants don't use it. Plants don't need it. And glyphosate works the same way, targeting a system that plants depend upon, but animals do not, which is genius. Ironically, the woman's husband was saying that he had just purchased a. He called it a flamethrower. I think he meant a propane torch attaches to a 20 pound tank and you use it to burn weeds and maybe, uh, melt ice. And uh, he didn't say, but my take on it was that he was, um, boasting or pointing out that there was a nonchemical solution alternative. But the thing is, if you applied that torch to the weeds. And applied the same torch to a person. Yes, in that case, the effect would be the same. You have something that's a threat to all of life, in fact, which hardly makes it superior unless you can direct it exactly where you want it to. But Roundup does that all by itself. Now, despite that plant specific mechanism. Glyphosate Roundup is often described with one alarming phrase. It's linked to Cancer. Well, linked to Cancer is another one of those phrases that has lost any real meaning, but it's useful as click bait. But the phrase comes from, and it's true, it is linked. It comes from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is an agency of the World Health Organization, a part of the United Nations. Now, we often mock the WHO in the un. And to be fair or to be critical, they have done nothing to stop the fear mongering. But this time we'll say they're technically correct as far as they go because in 2015, the agency placed glyphosate into group two A, probably carcinogenic to humans. Now that sounds frightening, but. The context matters because IARC asks a very broad question, can this cause cancer? Under some circumstances, this broad question is identifying a possible hazard, whereas regulators, we are, we're getting back to RFK, junior Trump, the EPA, they ask a very different question, otherwise. Why doesn't Trump's EPA ban it? Well, for that matter, why didn't Biden's Well, it's because agencies like the US Environmental Protection Agency ask, does this cause cancer at the levels people usually encounter? Now that's evaluating actual risk, not a hypothetical one. And those are two very different questions. Now, here's an example often used that might explain it to you. A tiger, a bengal tiger, somebody a Siberian tiger. Any tiger tigers are dangerous, so they present a hazard. Now then are you afraid to go to the zoo? There's dangerous tigers there. Well, of course not. We all admit that a tiger is very dangerous, but if the tiger is behind thick glass at the zoo, the risk to you is very small. And the IARC of the WHO identifies the tiger, the tiger as being potentially dangerous. Now regulators are measuring just how far away are you from the cage? Now here's the interesting part about all this. These classifications, glyphosate sits in group two A of the IARC, and so do some other things. Sit in that same group. Some other things you, uh, probably encounter every week. One of them is red meat, another is. Very hot beverages. A third is working the night shift. In other words, the same category that Roundup is in also includes steak, hot coffee, and staying up all night at work. Now, do you see anybody banning the night shift? The IARC categories identify hazards. They do not measure the size of the danger, and you can see how much more strange it looks when you look at the category above two A, the worst category, if you will, and that's group one, carcinogenic to humans. That list includes tobacco smoke. It also includes processed meat like bacon and hot dogs. We'll talk about that one sometime soon. It also includes alcohol and sun lamps. These are things that are known to be carcinogenic to her, to humans, not probably. So all these things are more dangerous, and again, that's loose language than Roundup, according to the IARC. And it's the IARC. That is the source being used by the Maha moms. Now glyphosate is hardly the first chemical to become a public villain. If you're as old as I'm, you'll remember many of them. In the 1970s, the panic was about saccharin. Animal studies suggested it might cause cancer in laboratory rats, bladder cancer, if I recall correctly. So warning labels appeared. Then restaurants removed from tables, and later research showed that the mechanism involved in rats did not apply to humans. Hmm. Kinda like The Shikimate Sequence, wouldn't you say? Then there was Alar, a chemical used on apples. It was just used to make them look pretty. And a television report warned that it might cause cancer in children. So parents panicked. Apple sales collapsed and farmers lost millions of dollars. And of course, later reviews found that consumer risk had been dramatically exaggerated. Another word for lying. And these stories all follow the same familiar pattern. A chemical is identified. Animal studies show someone went looking for a possible hazard. Headlines appear and the activists mobilize people looking for a cause. And long before the is settled, the chemical becomes a villain and glyphosate fits neatly into all that tradition. Because once the IARC classification appeared, headlines began describing Roundup as controversial. You'll see that word often in outlets, like the New York Times. Controversial, but in science, controversy means experts are divided. In the press, the word controversy is just meaningless, clickbait, because in the case of glyphosate, the broader regulatory picture is very, very different. As we said earlier, Roundup has been legal to use for decades, and the US Environmental Protection Agency concluded glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic at typical exposure levels. Well, I'm repeating myself, but I wa wanted to throw in this part because you know what they say, it's the us The US is just reckless, right? Well, no, the European Food Safety Authority reached a similar conclusion and so did Health Canada. So that tired slogan, Hey, it's banned in the U European Union. So why do we still use it in the, in the us? Well, that doesn't work. Because when regulators worldwide evaluate real world exposure, the conclusions are remarkably consistent. Hmm. And because of that, remember something else. Glyphosate is not some rare chemical used in tiny quantities. It's actually the most widely used herbicide in the world. And that's a good thing. We'll talk about that in a second because millions of tons have been applied globally since the 1970s. Farmers and agricultural workers have been using it for decades. So if glyphosate produced large cancer risks in normal use, wouldn't you expect that? We would've seen a clear population signal by now, but that signal has never appeared. So RFK Junior and the Maha Moms are either brilliant prophets of something that's yet to appear. Or they're all just on the fringe. Now, there are some other illogical points we could make. You know, glyphosate isn't generally sprayed by suburban activists. It's mostly used by farmers. So if there are risks, the people most exposed are the applicators, the farmers themselves, they mix the chemicals, load the sprayers, work in the fields. But the people doing all the complaining aren't farmers and have no contact with the herbicide. I just said herbicide. Herbicide. So they could never be affected by contact with it. There's some other illogic I've, over the years I've known farmers who criticize chemicals used by other farmers. The dairy farmers criticized Malian and the orchards and the fruit. Farmers blame Roundup on the field crops and the corn farmers. Criticize BGT and cows. But the products they themselves use, they'll defend vigorously with very scientific explanations. So human nature hasn't changed much and it pretty much crosses all strata. We all see risks clearly when someone else is taking them. But the thing about risk is that agriculture has always involved trade-offs. As I mentioned before, a good thing we have glyphosate because before it became widely known, farmers relied on herbicides like Paraquat. Paraquat is also extremely effective, but it's also highly toxic to humans. Not it could cause cancer with long-term exposure. Toxic, no, that's not what toxic means. Toxic as in if it gets on you, you could die. And no one is saying that about Roundup. The chemical surfactants. The detergents really, and other additives to the solution would probably do you more harm if you swallowed it than the glyphosate itself. I say probably, I believe it's true, but I'm not going to be the expert here. So when glyphosate arrived, many farmers saw it as an improvement. It was effective. It was affordable. It was safe. Far less acutely toxic than herbicides that replaced paraquat in the 1990s, or was it eighties? 1990s I think was the most common means of suicide in Latin America. But that part of the Roundup story rarely appears in modern headlines. Stepping back from the chemistry, something larger is happening here. Modern society has developed an intense feminine anxiety about risk. Everything has to be chemical free. Everything must be toxin free. Of course, everything is a chemical and toxicity is determined by the dose, but everything must promise a longer life even though biology doesn't work that way, I cancer results from accumulated mutations as cells divide and age. So if humans lived long enough, in my opinion, nearly everyone would develop cancer eventually. If an accident or a heart attack doesn't get you, you will get cancer. And that means the goal cannot realistically be to eliminate every possible carcinogen. That would be impossible. The real question should be something different. Not simply how long will we live, but how well can we live. Roundup is not magic and it isn't poison. It's a tool. It is a tool with costs and benefits. Like every tool humans have ever invented, science should always be questioned, but questioning science is not the same thing as rejecting it, and turning every scientific uncertainty into a moral crusade doesn't make the world safer. It just makes the conversation louder. The dinner conversation I had the other night wasn't really about Roundup. It was about something much more common about people repeating things they've heard confidently, passionately, and often without understanding the science behind them. Glyphosate may be controversial in the headlines, but controversy isn't the same thing as evidence. Sometimes it simply means the argument has been repeated often enough that it sounds like truth. And that's exactly when someone, someone like you needs to play the role of the 10th man. Thank you for listening.